


Sweet Dreams Form a Shade

by EirianErisdar



Series: Disaster Demon Family [1]
Category: Devil May Cry
Genre: 50-proof, A hyper-concentrated shot of angst, Angst, Angst with a Happy Ending, Dadgil, Gen, Hugely contrived mostly plotless 14000 word whumpfest with a guaranteed happy ending, Hurt/Comfort, In which it takes Vergil nearly dying for Nero in order for Nero to realise his father loves him, Poor Dante cannot handle losing both his brother and his nephew at once, Post-Devil May Cry 5, Protective Vergil (Devil May Cry), Vergil and Nero are both emotionally constipated good bois, Vergil and Nero learn to love each other in a four-day stabby stabby injury fest, Whump, then followed by a second chapter of complete brotherly and father-son fluff to make up for it
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-13
Updated: 2020-12-15
Packaged: 2021-03-10 16:40:39
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 19,467
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28050291
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/EirianErisdar/pseuds/EirianErisdar
Summary: On a demon hunt in Fortuna, an incident with the Yamato leads to Vergil and Nero trapped with endless waves of demons pouring through an open portal to Hell with no way of closing it.In which Vergil and Nero come to understand each other through a four-day odyssey of blood.
Relationships: Dante & Nero (Devil May Cry), Dante & Vergil (Devil May Cry), Nero & Vergil (Devil May Cry)
Series: Disaster Demon Family [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2054715
Comments: 65
Kudos: 247
Collections: Miscellaneous Must-read Fics





	1. When the Stars Threw Down Their Spears

**Author's Note:**

> Hey guys. So. No excuse for this? Just...Dante, Vergil, Nero?
> 
> Mush? Angst? Whump? Hyperfixation?
> 
> A two-parter, with the second part pure fluff to make up for the pint of condensed whump this thing is.
> 
> A note to my younger readers - there is occasional swearing in this fic, simply due to the gravitas of the situation and appropriate characterisation.
> 
> Music for this chapter: _Pale White Horse_ , The Oh Hellos

Regret.

Of all the emotions Vergil thought he would feel on the threshold of death, he had expected _regret_ the least. There had been bitter desperation when Mundus had so violently unmade him in the process of forming Nelo Angelo; determination and rage when he plunged Yamato into his own fading form to split his human and demon halves; and comfort in knowing he could finally _rest_ , when he had used his last breath as V to return to himself.

But here - as Vergil blinks slowly up at the stars in a spreading pool of his own blood, his son's hand in his and his brother's voice shouting his name from far, far away, over the ripping of steel against demon flesh - regret wells up from within him like the scalding blood that bubbles over his lips.

"Nero," he whispers, as his vision begins to grey at the edges.

His son's hand tightens in his, desperately-

Vergil closes his eyes.

(:~:)

It begins, as you might expect, with a phone call.

Vergil does not deign to look up from his book at the first shrill ring; the ancient rotary phone, like the half-squashed armchair in which he is presently resting, the tacky wallpaper, and the constantly-flickering filament bulbs remain in this state of disrepair entirely due to Dante’s incomprehensible attachment to them. So, as far as Vergil is concerned, the phone and the distasteful clientele that enquire at _Devil May Cry_ fall soley within Dante’s purview.

The phone is still ringing.

Vergil turns a page.

A dull thudding sounds from the direction of the upstairs bathroom. Bits of faded plaster drop from the ceiling, scattering like ashes across the bloated floorboards.

"HEY, JACKASS! ANSWER THE PHONE!” Dante’s voice is muffled by the sound of running water.

Vergil blithely ignores him.

The phone continues to ring.

A door creaking open.

“VERGIL!”

Another page. Vergil taps his chin thoughtfully as he peruses it.

The sound of the upstairs bathroom door smashing against the wall ricochets down the stairs. Bits of plaster rain down around Vergil, staining the limp velvet of the sofa with patches of white powder.

Vergil calmly brushes off his shoulders as the rapid squeak of wet feet on wood rises over the continued ringing of the phone. He makes the mistake of focusing overmuch on the lines before him, though, and his hair brushes the edge of the wet towel that whips through the space where his head had been a moment earlier.

Vergil lowers his book and stares accusingly at Dante, who smirks at him – then a blur of motion as the towel snaps toward him again.

In his haste to save his precious book – a _first edition_ Wilfred Owen, for goodness’ sake – Vergil’s head snaps back from the force of a heavy, damp towel smacking him full in the face.

The ringing stops.

“Devil May Cry,” Dante’s singsong voice says.

The towel slides slowly down Vergil’s face to pool in his lap, and he straightens ever-so-slowly to glare at his brother, who lounges lazily against the desk edge, one hand gripping the handset, free hand grasping a second towel around his waist as his sopping white hair drips messily onto the tarnished wood.

“Mm-hmm. How many?” Dante says, eyes dancing mischievously as he returns his brother’s stare.

“I’m going to kill you,” Vergil declares. He reaches for the Yamato, set within arm’s reach at his side as it always is, wherever he goes.

“Uh-huh. Sure.” Dante has the _gall_ to wink as he does so – obviously speaking to the client, but also openly challenging Vergil’s words.

Vergil stands, casting his book aside. “By the time this is over you will be _pleading_ for the sweet release of death–”

“–Yeah, yeah, hold on, my brother’s being a hardass like he always is – Verge, big job here? Maybe do the _shhhh_ thing? – yeah, you were saying?”

The Yamato sings from its sheath and whips towards Dante’s smirk – or, where Dante’s smirk used to be. The owner of the smirk in question has danced a few steps away, handset tucked between bare shoulder and chin and the ancient rotary phone itself caught up in his free hand.

“Uh-huh. Okay. Meet you there.” Dante slams the phone back on the table, gives the handset an entirely superfluous twirl, and smashes it back into the receiver without a care.

Really, it is a wonder the phone has not cracked in half sometime in the last two decades.

Vergil levels the Yamato squarely between Dante’s smiling eyes, a hairsbreath from the bridge of his nose. “Choose the method of your passing, brother.”

Dante raises a casual hand and flicks away the blade with a single finger. “I think I’ll _pass,”_ he grins – and Vergil nearly reverses the Yamato to plunge it into Dante’s arm, because Dante would definitely survive that to whine about it – “But we have a job. A big one. Many demons, much killing to be done, yada-yada-yada, the usual.”

Vergil bares his teeth and tightens his grip on Yamato – but Dante straightens, and Vergil halts as abruptly as he begins.

“It’s Fortuna,” Dante says, and there is the ghost of seriousness in his humoured tone. “The girls are already there. No word from Nero yet. You in?”

A shard of ice spears into Vergil’s gut at the thought.

_Fortuna. No word yet from Nero._

He lowers the Yamato with careful impassivity. “Of course,” he says, in as unaffected a voice as he can manage. “If only not to let you brag about your kill count for the rest of the month.”

Dante barks a laugh. “Right.” He claps a still-damp hand on Vergil’s shoulder, and grins at Vergil’s flinch as water stains his immaculate coat. “I’m gonna go get dressed. Won’t be the first time I’ve gone into a fight wearing something like this, but boy if road rash doesn’t hurt when you don’t got more on.”

Vergil nods once, hand white-knuckled on the Yamato’s hilt.

Dante’s hand stays on his shoulder for a moment longer than it should, the merest pressure. Dante’s half of their mother’s amulet swings against his collarbone as he straightens.

“You can use the time to call Nero, yeah? See if he wants in.”

Vergil stands there, still, as Dante’s thudding footsteps fade up the stairs. Vergil’s half of the amulet suddenly feels much heavier where it beneath his shirt, suspended by a silver chain.

There are increasing moments, in the two months since they returned from the underworld, where Vergil and Nero have been able to hold conversation without resorting to swords and bullets and demonic energy flaring into the air. Vergil holds each small, personal detail that Nero shares close to his soul, committing the exact words to memory like the poetry he so values. Each precious gem of memory also spears his heart with the knowledge of all he has missed in over two decades of his son’s life, but there is nothing Vergil prizes so much in the world, except perhaps for the Yamato.

And yet…on the rare occasions Nero and he are alone, without the boisterous presence of Dante, Vergil finds himself falling back into silence more often than not – a quiet, furled part of him terrified of speaking one wrong word and shattering the fragile, carefully built bridge between them forever.

_Fortuna._

_No word from Nero._

That might very well be good news – Nero is perfectly capable of handling demon hunts alone. And yet…

Vergil’s hand drifts over the phone. Something he does not want to admit is welling up within him, curling his fingers over the handset – something remarkably similar to concern and fear.

Concern, for Nero’s welfare.

 _Fear_ , should Nero have the task well in hand and take the call as an insult.

Vergil closes his eyes, running his free hand over the grip of the Yamato to ground himself.

A hand encased in half-finger gloves bats his away, and Vergil snaps his eyes open.

“Aww, c’mon, Vergil,” Dante drawls, hooking the headset in the crook of his neck as the rotary dial whirrs under his other hand. “Couldn’t you get over your emotional constipation long enough to call your own son?” His voice holds its usual easy lilt, but there in his gaze is the merest hint of disappointment.

Sentimental fool.

Vergil growls at Dante and stalks across the room. His hand remains white-knuckled on the hilt of Yamato at his side, but he forces his shoulders to remain relaxed. Unaffected.

“Hey, it’s Dante,” Dante is saying, and it takes every morsel of willpower Vergil holds not to turn in place. “Mmh? Uh-huh. We’re on our way.”

The _ding_ of handset meeting receiver.

Vergil turns, deliberately slowly, and knows he has not quite succeeded in hiding his emotion when he meets Dante’s knowing gaze.

“That was Kyrie,” Dante says, jovially. “Nero’s fine, last she knows. Just headed out to it.”

“Then let us make haste,” Vergil cuts him off, already moving towards the door. Relief wars with impatience within him.

He hears Dante bark a laugh behind him as he draws the Yamato from its sheath and slices a portal into the air.

(:~:)

They emerge under a night sky studded with stars, lit with moonlight.

“About time you two got here!”

Vergil raises an eyebrow as Nero’s raw-throated yell ricochets across the square towards them. The square itself, once a well-ordered series of graceful fountains and stonework, now resembles a scene from a particularly bloody war epic – shattered stone mulched with demon guts, fiery craters seething with burning oil, fountains smashed to dust trickling water that quickly turns sanguine with congealing blood. A haze of smoke lays over it all, with the double-flash of Lady’s guns, Trish’s flickering lightning and the blue glimmer of Nero’s demon arms blossoming from within.

“Eyy, how’s my favourite nephew?” Dante calls, whooping like an idiot as he revs Cavaliere and roars down off the rooftop, Cavaliere’s exhaust pipes sparking flame.

Rolling his eyes, Vergil reaches into the nexus of power in his core, folds time paper-thin, and leaps down into the battle proper, darting ahead of his brother to send a summoned sword straight through the throat of the nearest demon, spraying vile ichor into the air. Vergil spares a single, glorious instant to smugly meet Dante’s gaze – _first blood’s mine, beat you to it_ – before the Yamato dances from its sheath and plunges, thirsty for blood, into the demon horde.

For the longest while, the world sharpens into exquisite clarity; the singing of the Yamato in his hand, the sheer exhilaration of demon power rushing through his veins to burst in conflagrations of brilliant blue blades that turn the air into sharpened rain.

It would have been almost perfect even if he were fighting alone; but there, to his left, a flare of demonic power so perfect a counterpoint to his own – Dante, Ebony and Ivory in hand, hooting with glee as he draws a blazing double-helix over Vergil’s head, a maelstrom of bullets ripping open a half-dozen demons at once; and to Vergil’s right, the deep roar of Red Queen revving into explosive power, Nero whooping as he sends his devil breaker smashing into the jaw of a Fury and flips onto the arm as it returns, riding the roiling air currents to leap off and eviscerate the demon from jaw to tail.

Watching Nero fight, Vergil feels pride well up within him – the sheer fluency of his son’s attacks, the raw power of their lineage bursting from each movement. It is at times like these he is grateful to fight alongside his son – to speak in a language that does not need interpretation, to understand and anticipate each other’s movements with utter clarity.

Together, the three of them slice a wide swathe through the lesser demons, with Lady and Trish cleaning up stragglers at the periphery, and soon, through the haze of smoke and flame, Vergil catches sight of the source of the demons themselves – a large, flickering, jagged gap in the veil between worlds.

“Vergil, there!” Dante shouts, gesturing with a hand bloody with demon guts.

“I see it,” Vergil returns, crouching in the moment of stillness Nero’s exploding devil breaker gives them, feeling the Yamato flare to brilliant heat under his fingers as Judgement Cut sharpens the very air to steel, disemboweling two dozen demons at once. Dante’s very vocal whoop of laughter at this sends warmth blossoming in Vergil’s chest.

“Ugh,” Nero says behind him as vile ichor rains down upon them, and Vergil turns hurriedly on the spot – but Nero is smiling as he snaps a new devil breaker into place, blue demon hands settling on his shoulders.

Vergil feels the edge of his mouth quirk upwards in response.

Nero catches sight of the almost-smile and blinks at him, something like astonishment on his face.

Dante has already run off, grinning, whipping King Cerberus in a whirl of blue ice about his sword-hand.

Vergil tears his gaze away from his son and leaps after his brother. A few more adrenaline-fueled paces of blood-slick ground, and they are at the threshold of the portal itself.

The Yamato twirls in Vergil’s hand. He can feel Dante and Nero flanking him, their presences white-hot with demon energy.

“C’mon, I want pizza,” Dante moans. “Hurry it up.”

Vergil rolls his eyes and tightens his grip on the Yamato’s hilt, feeling for the gap in space that anchors open the rip in the veil–

–and two colossal, shaggy arms burst from the rip on either side of Vergil, snatching up Dante and Nero in the grasp of two clawed hands.

“GOLIAAAAAaaaaaaaath–” Dante’s voice fades away comically with distance as he is hurled across the battlefield in a mess of white hair and crimson leather.

Nero’s grunt of pain as the goliath tightens its grasp is a dagger to Vergil’s heart. Vergil reverses the Yamato in a lightning-fast flourish to plunge into the goliath’s wrist, and hears Nero yell as his demon arms gouge long, bloody furrows into the goliath’s matted fur.

A bone-shaking howl echoes through the portal, muffled by the veil, and powerful fingers that grasp Nero loosen, allowing him to drop to the ground.

Four small, piggish eyes glow fell and yellow in a snarling face as the goliath emerges fully from the gap in the veil, climbing to its feet in a thunder of massive limbs against stone. Its gargantuan shadow falls over Vergil and Nero in the silvery moonlight.

Vergil smiles mirthlessly and tightens his grip on Yamato, readying to leap up and blind the creature – when a sharp intake of breath from Nero causes him to snap his gaze towards his son.

Nero has plunged Red Queen into the ground at his feet, his freed left hand tugging with increasing desperation at the sparking devil breaker – a Ragtime, Vergil recognises – connected to his right elbow. To Vergil’s concern, a dark blue-black glow is beginning to emit from the crushed cracks in the devil breaker’s casing, pulsing with increasing intensity in a high-pitched whine.

“Something’s wrong with this thing!” Nero shouts, fingers working desperately at the join between metal and flesh. “It’s jammed, I think it’s gonna blow–”

Several things happen at once.

The goliath opens the slavering, flaming maw in its abdomen and reaches out–

–Vergil takes one step towards Nero, the Yamato extended in a hope to slice away the devil breaker and allow Nero to reform his arm–

–Nero’s eyes widen as the Ragtime flares blue-black-WHITE just as the Yamato touches the metal–

The world dissolves into blue-black flame, and a fist of superheated air strikes Vergil square in the gut, knocking all the breath out of him at once.

The Yamato is ripped from his hand with impossible force, wrenching his wrist in a brief flare of pain before his healing takes over.

Nero shouts once, a wordless exclamation of agony.

Jagged stone digs into his shoulders. Vergil snarls as he wrenches himself into the flip, curling into the inconsequential spikes of pain as he skids to a halt on one knee, one gloved hand having scored five equal gouges in the ground before him, the other thrown back, grasping the Yamato’s sheath.

Silence.

That is the first, chilling thing that Vergil notes – that there is no sound at all, save for his own tightly controlled breathing. His hair has fallen free from its neatly slicked form, and he brushes back the grime-stained white strands from his vision with an impatient hand.

There are two things and two things only on his mind.

Nero and the Yamato, _Nero_ _and the Yamato,_ ** _Nero and the Yamato–_**

The dust has cleared.

Vergil straightens, and freezes in place, staring.

There is no trace of the goliath – only a shallow, burnt crater still smoking at the edges, with the scent of charred flesh hanging in the air.

But beside the portal to the underworld, the Yamato hangs a metre or so in the air – encased in a blue-black bubble of frozen space-time, the Yamato’s sharp edge buried in a single, opaque blue shard – a remnant of the Elder Geryon Knight from which Nico crafted the Ragtime devil breaker.

And erupting from the top of this sphere itself is fountain of pure, blue-black light, streaming upwards in a column before gracefully flaring out into a large, translucent dome that curves back down to meet the ground, in a strangely beautiful hemisphere of dark blue light roughly fifty paces across.

A few steps away, Nero is staggering to his feet, the cyan-toned skin of his full devil trigger form still knitting back together. There is an echo of irritated pain in his yellow-red eyes.

Vergil’s lips thin. The fact that Nero had no choice but to release devil trigger –and that his wounds are _still_ visibly healing – belies the extent of the injuries he must have received from the blast.

“You are well?” he says without inflection, coming to a halt at Nero’s side as his son reverts to his human form. Vergil hopes he has succeeded in keeping the mounting concern out of his voice – there is no need to make Nero think Vergil considers him weak.

There is something other than physical hurt in Nero’s eyes as he snaps his chin towards Vergil, though. “I’m fine,” he replies, shortly. “I can still fight, if that’s what you’re asking.”

Vergil feels his next words stick in his throat, stunned that despite his best efforts to the contrary, Nero apparently still believes Vergil is disappointed in him.

“That’s not–” he begins. “Ah,” he murmurs instead, looking away. It is at times like these he hates himself for the inability to express anything – anything at all – without harming those around him.

Vergil glimpses Nero’s shoulders drop from their defensive hunch as Vergil turns away, his own shoulders rising to protect his vulnerable core.

“Wait–” Nero says, slowly–

“Hey!”

Vergil and Nero turn as one to find Dante jogging up to the other side of the wall of light, easy grin in place, grime-soaked coat swinging jauntily in the night air – until he runs face-first into what is a _surprisingly solid_ wall of light, that is.

Vergil allows himself a smirk at that.

Dante, naturally, springs up again like a berserk roly-poly marionette with his nosebleed already drying, looking for all the world like he meant to do that.

“You really know how to make things even more of a mess, don’tcha?” Dante calls, eyes darting between the two of them in a rapid assessment for injury even as his tone remains deceptively light. “You two all right? Need me to break in and carry your geriatric bones out of there, Vergil?”

“I am unharmed,” Vergil hisses. He hears Nero stifle a snort behind him, and pointedly does not look at his son as he approaches the centre of the dome. Nothing remains of the lesser demons here – only the shimmering gap in the veil between worlds and the frozen dark blue sphere beside it, Yamato suspended within.

Vergil extends a hand, hovering over the surface of the sphere. Up close, there is an unnatural air to it – flecks of metal slag still dot the space within, as if caught in an eyeblink as they were flung from the piece of Elder Geryon Knight that comprised the centre of the Ragtime.

He hears Nero give a low whistle as he comes up behind him. “That’s a weird one. I’ve never seen one of the devil breakers do _that._ ”

Vergil’s fingers move into the sphere.

Instantly, he feels the Yamato’s familiar presence – but terribly, terribly wrong. It is as though the Yamato has frozen – ice-cold, unmoving, with none of the song it sings for him whenever he holds it in his hands.

And strangely, as his hand slips deeper into the sphere, its motion slows in his vision, although his fingers feel as though they continue to reach…and reach…and reach…

_“Hey!”_

Something smashes into his cheek, and Vergil stumbles back, blinking.

What had he been doing? He had been…he was…

Vergil comes back to himself slowly.

Clawed hands of blue light – _Nero’s demon arms_ – are holding Vergil upright, shaking him.

“Nero,” he breathes eventually, eyes focusing on the concern on Nero’s features.

His son releases him abruptly.

“What the hell was that?” Nero demands. “You just – your hand went in the sphere, and then you sort of just gradually froze and your eyes glazed over like you were _dead_ –”

Vergil jolts. Looks down at his hand, which appears quite normal in the starlight, half-finger gloves slick with demon blood.

He looks back up at the sphere. It is unchanged, the pieces of molten metal caught half-flight as they had exploded from the center of the devil breaker.

“Most curious,” Vergil murmurs.

Nero makes a frustrated noise. “You need to stop with the vague comments, old man.”

Vergil looks up at the translucent blue dome above them, and wonders.

Then he turns on the spot and begins walking. He hears Nero swear softly behind him and his son’s quick steps following, but Vergil is too occupied with thinking to care.

 _Time_. Ragtime allows its user partial control of time, and the Yamato, space. How many times has Vergil leant into Yamato’s thrumming presence and used its power to bend space to his will and step from one end of a battle to another? Without the Yamato, he cannot move through reality without traversing the intervening space – not through this wall of light, which echoes with the taste of the Yamato’s power.

Dante is waiting impatiently for them when the reach the edge of the dome, Trish and Lady on either side of him.

“What was that?” Dante says. “Why’d you leave the Yamato there?”

Vergil chooses his words carefully. “I believe there is an…event horizon of sorts around the Yamato, for the moment. I found myself drawn into it, without ever reaching the Yamato itself. I am indebted to Nero for removing me.” He hears a small noise of surprise from Nero beside him at those last words.

A furrow forms between Dante’s brows. “Well, that’ll put a wrench in things. We can’t close the portal without the Yamato.”

As though responding to Dante’s words, the portal chooses this moment to flash as it disgorges a half-dozen Empusa.

Vergil’s hand goes automatically to his opposite hip, only to close on empty air.

“On it,” Nero says, already darting away, a feral grin on his lips as his right arm blurs to blue mist and he snaps a new devil breaker into place.

Vergil stands there for a moment, holding Dante’s falsely cheerful gaze. As much as he likes to make fun at the expense of Dante’s intellect, Vergil knows his brother is no fool; Dante will have thought through the possible scenarios in just as much detail as Vergil has.

“So,” Dante says, over the sound of Red Queen eviscerating one Empusa after another.

“So,” Vergil says plainly, “either Nero and I break this barrier, or you do.”

A wicked smile tugs at Dante’s lips, and Lady and Trish leap back as one, familiar enough with Dante’s antics to know what will come next.

Vergil folds his arms and raises an eyebrow in challenge as Dante steps back a few paces, twirls the devil sword Dante a few times, reverses it, and plunges the blade into his own chest. Demonic energy flares from the wound, blasting forth in a blazing wave of orange-red flame, revealing Dante in his full demon form already rocketing towards the barrier at full speed, sword in hand.

BONG.

Vergil looks down at Dante, who blinks blearily up at him, reverted to human form, flat on his back on the other side of the very-much-still-intact barrier.

“Hn,” Vergil murmurs, smirking.

“Ow. I’m okay, by the way,” Dante wheezes, raising an arm only for it to flop down again. “Thanks _so_ much for asking.”

Vergil spares a glance behind him. Nero has cleared the Empusa easily, and is already stalking towards the next group of hellbats that have just appeared through the portal, Blue Rose smoking in his hand.

“It appears I have more scum to deal with.” Vergil gestures as Dante staggers to his feet. “I would suggest you call Nicoletta in the meantime. She might shed some light on this turn of events.”

Dante’s bark of laughter echoes after him as Vergil darts towards the fray. “Ha! If I tell her you called her that she’ll roast your sorry ass!”

Vergil leaps into the fray, summoning an array of blue-lit blades to hail upon the hellbats like deadly rain. But as he reaches into his soul and focuses infernal energy into his free hand to form Mirage Edge, his other hand tight about the Yamato’s empty scabbard, he still feels the absence of the Yamato like a missing limb.

He fuels his power with that irritation, and paints the air with blades.

(:~:)

Dante knows it must be bad when Nico’s starts cursing for real, and not simply for emphasis.

“Dammit, can’t believe I missed this,” she growls, slamming open the door to the Devil May Cry van. “Damned rookie thing to do.” Behind her, the translucent blue wall shimmers on, through which Nero and Vergil’s devastating dance continues, cerulean blades and winged demon arms flashing with occasional crimson flame from Red Queen, the howls of dying demons rising above it all.

Earlier, Dante had tried to dig his way down with devil trigger to the edge of the dome, and found the wall continued downwards – until it curved inwards, obviously forming another half sphere underground.

Four hours in, and neither Nero or Vergil show any signs of tiring, even as the sun begins to rise over the horizon, casting the square in alternate bars of orange and red.

Dante tears his gaze away from the carnage and focuses on Nico. “So what’s this sparkly lil’ thing, then?” he says with a brilliant, unfettered smile, jabbing a thumb over his shoulder at the dome. Lady and Trish lounge against a fountain near the van, passing a bottle of liquor between them.

“So it’s like this, right?” Nico says, stomping over to Dante and slamming a rectangular frame of metal in his hand. “This here is a Ragtime core,” she says, “housin’ a fragment of that badass elder geryon knight V defeated way back when, y’know? It manipulates time, in like, super short bursts. But old Mr Grouch there,” – she points at the flickering form of Vergil – “his fancy schmancy sword cuts through space. From what you two idiots’ve been tellin’ me, the power of the Yamato ain’t something to be messed with. So when father-of-the-year tried to save lil’ snarky there by cutting off that Ragtime, the sword and the fragment must’ve like, reacted–”

“–and messed with space-time,” Dante finishes, staring at the Ragtime core in his hand. “ _Majorly,”_ he adds, glancing at the point in the distance where the Yamato still hangs suspended midair, frozen in time now, he understands. “Right, right. I get it. How do we get ‘em out, then?”

Nico pauses, “Huh, now _that’s_ where the problem is, ya see. Ain’t sure when that thing’s gonna come down. Depends on the time decay. Could be a day. Could be a week, at most.”

“A week?!” Dante barely registers the demonic energy that has seeped out of the edges of his cloak, roiling red with the sudden panic in his gut. “They need to last out a whole _week?!”_

His mind is spinning a thousand miles a second. During the period he and Vergil had remained in the Underworld, they had often had duels lasting days, by their reckoning – a record two and a half days at the longest, by their best guess. But when either of them needed rest – they required less than full-blooded humans, to be sure, but required it nonetheless – they would find shelter and take turns keeping watch, preventing any curious demons from wandering too close.

But _this_ – a portal wide enough to admit a goliath, without any way of closing it, and a dome of dimension-defying space-time trapping Vergil and Nero in it with nowhere to retreat, to evade, to hide?

This is another thing altogether.

_And Vergil does not have the Yamato._

Nico is saying something – something about needing to sit down and do some calculating – but Dante is already turning from her, the piece of Ragtime dropping from his fingers, brushing past Trish and Lady, though they both say something to him as he passes. Something immaterial. Useless.

Dante presses both gloved hands against the cool, solid light of the dome, and stares at his brother and his nephew hungrily, as if he could reach them by will alone.

Vergil and Nero have truly found their rhythm together now – Dante can see it in the way Nero shifts aside a moment before Vergil gestures brilliant blue swords to lance through the space Nero was was a moment before; how Vergil gathers lesser demons with Mirage Edge precisely to where Nero can blaze his way through them with Gerbera.

Watching them, watching the small, pride-filled twitch of Vergil’s lips when Nero moves in for a perfect kill and the exhilarated delight in Nero’s face when the two of them move precisely in tandem – Dante almost does not want to tell them, to break apart this new ground they have gained as father and son.

Dante’s hands form into fists, clenched so tight they hurt.

He takes a breath – a breath so like the moment before he entered Urizen’s den, knowing he would have to kill his brother again – and sends demonic energy flaring through his fists in a booming retort.

Father and son snap shared gazes towards him, and Dante straightens, drags a smile out of the deepest part of him – the part that sometimes makes him sleep for days on end on the couch at Devil May Cry without food or water, an easy smile on his lips for all who enter, lethargy in his bones and the world a grey morass of nothing.

“So, good news, bad news?” he calls, not quite able to stop the crack in his jaunty tone. “Which do you want first?”

Nero slips into full devil trigger to obliterate a group of Hell Judecca. Dante winces at the obvious expenditure of precious demon energy, but the ensuing pause gives Vergil and Nero time to move towards the edge of the dome, where Dante stands.

“Right, when is this thing coming down?” Nero says, shaking out his devil breaker, the metal gleaming in the slow sunrise. “I wanna get back home soon. Kyrie makes a mean breakfast spread.”

“I concur,” Vergil says, flicking a crystalline blade over his shoulder without looking to spear through the first of the new wave of Empusa that now begin to emerge from the portal. “This was an amusing exercise, but I would prefer to return to my notes on Wilfred Owen.”

Dante looks at the both of them, and knows his smile has not quite reached his eyes when Vergil looks at him sharply.

“So, good news first, then,” he says, with a forced smile. “You two are going to have some quality father-son bonding time.”

Nero’s scoff and Vergil’s almost-flinch sends disappointment lancing into Dante’s core. His brother and nephew really are foolish in similar ways, sometimes.

“Get on with it, Dante,” Nero says, fishing Blue Rose out of its holster to obliterate the first Empusa that scuttles close.

“Bad news,” Dante says, feeling his smile slipping, now, “Nico says this dome likely won’t be coming down in a day. Or possibly a week.”

Blue Rose stops firing abruptly. Vergil’s Mirage Blades freeze midair where they had been slicing through the last of the Empusa, and convulse chaotically, pulverizing the demons in an uncharacteristically messy kill.

“Okay,” Nero breathes, lowering Blue Rose. “Okay.” He glances at the portal, where a Fury slowly emerges, claw by blazing claw. “Could you call Kyrie for me?” he says, with a ghost of his usual cocksure smile. “Tell her I won’t be back for breakfast, and not to worry.”

“Sure, will do,” Dante says, flashing a grin at his nephew.

“Dante,” Vergil says, without inflection. He has lowered Mirage Edge now, his opposite hand clenched tight around the Yamato’s empty sheath.

Dante nods once.

There is nothing that needs to be said. They stand on opposite sides of this thin, translucent barrier, and understand each other with the innate familiarity of twins, without needing speech.

(:~:)

_A day, or a week._

The first thought that comes to Vergil’s mind is memory – of bitter, formless eons in the Underworld, the Yamato in his hand, hunted down again and again by Mundus’s servant hordes, killing and surviving and surviving and killing until he could do so no more.

Vergil holds Dante’s gaze for a long, long moment before turning to where Nero is already moving towards the Fury, Red Queen in hand. “Nero,” he calls.

“What?” Nero hisses, looking dead ahead.

“You will need to adjust how you fight.”

Now _that_ makes Nero twist on the spot. “I don’t need advice from you,” he spits. “I’m capable of surviving this on my own.”

“This is no time for youthful bluster,” Vergil says coldly, snapping out a mirage blade that spears the Fury through the eye. It crumples immediately, even as another emerges from the portal, followed by two more. “If you wish to survive this and return to Kyrie, I would suggest you listen to one who has far more experience against endless tides of demons than you do.”

For a moment, it almost seems as though his son might refuse. There is furious denial there in his expression, and furled within, an almost helpless vulnerability.

“We need to conserve our demon energy,” Vergil says, in the scant few moments before the first Fury notices them. “Leave Devil Trigger for only the most desperate of situations. Move less. This is not the time for flashy showings of power. Your devil breakers are now too precious to waste. Use them well, and sparingly.”

“And you?” Nero says quietly, revving up Red Queen as the first Fury stalks closer.

“I will manage,” Vergil says, allowing the greaves and gauntlets of Beowulf to shimmer into existence on his arms and legs. “And I will guard your back, as you must mine.”

There is a glimmer of warm surprise in Nero’s gaze at those last words.

Then the Fury is upon them, and they begin as one, as the sun rises well and truly over Fortuna proper.

(:~:)

Dante sets down the phone on the van’s dashboard, and gives in to the urge to bend over his knees and put his head in his hands. The scent of stale cigarette smoke burnt into the squashy passenger seat grounds him.

He has done his best with Kyrie, but a girl of her caliber would figure out something was off sooner rather than later.

Nico’s muttering drifts from somewhere behind him, among the clutter of the van. Numbers, scientific crap Dante never had the attention to learn.

Dante breathes in again, and almost chokes. Perhaps the scent of stale smoke is not a good idea after all – it brings him too close to the crackle of encroaching flame, the creak of twisting wood, huddling much as he is now over his scraped-up knees in the dark, airless closet, waiting for his mother to return with Vergil.

He sits up abruptly, rubs a hand over his eyes.

“Hell,” he whispers, to nobody in particular.

“I’ve got it!”

Nico’s yell galvanizes him out of his seat. He crashes into the back of the van’s small space, eliciting a yelp from Nico.

“Hey, watch the merchandise! These things are fragile!”

“Nico.” Dante hears the demon fighting for release growl under his human voice.

“Okay, okay!” Nico says, flinging up her hands. “I’ve double-checked my calculations and everythin’. Ninety-eight hours.”

“Ninety–” Dante stops.

“A little over four days,” Lady says behind him, sticking her head in the driver’s side window. Something similar to concern flickers in her eyes, and Dante wants to punch something, anything, to get this feeling out of his chest.

“And Dante,” Lady continues, “We have company.”

Dante spares a moment to curse volubly as he flings open the passenger door.

(:~:)

“Fuck off,” the man with white hair in the grimy red coat says, and the lieutenant bristles.

“Sir,” the lieutenant says, “I am aware demon hunting is your specialty, but it remains that I am under orders to form a perimeter around any remaining demon activity and ensure it remains contained.” He feels his platoon behind him, stood straight and unified against this…hobo-like figure in bloodstained leather.

The man’s blue eyes flash, ice-cold, as he throws his head back in a roar of laughter. “That dome back there,” he laughs, “is keeping everything contained. In fact, it’s keeping everything so well contained it’s keeping two of my family trapped in there, too.”

The lieutenant leans back, fear rooting his feet to the ground, as crimson embers suddenly flare from under this strange man’s coat, and that voice somehow growls with the predatory echo of demonic power.

“So, lieutenant,” the man smiles dangerously, “The name’s Dante. Legendary devil hunter, son of Sparda, and if you don’t know what that means you can ask anyone on this damned island. I could kill two dozen demons before you even drew your sidearm, capiche? So you can take your orders and shove them where the sun don’t shine.”

The lieutenant gulps.

“What’s up with Fortuna, anyway?” the man – _Dante_ , is saying, now. “Since when do they allow military forces from the mainland here?”

“Sir,” the lieutenant says, attempting to look around Dante to where cerulean and crimson light flashes within the dome of light.

“Okay, you know what? I refer you to my associates,” Dante says, and two women suddenly flank him – wearing eye-popping outfits and hefting even more eye-popping weaponry. “Good luck talking to them – Lady, Trish, have fun. I don’t care.” And with that, he stalks off, a hard set to his shoulders.

“Uh,” the lieutenant gapes, then the blonde-haired woman summons _lightning_ to her fingers, and he begins to quaver in his boots.

(:~:)

It is late afternoon the first time Vergil notes Nero slipping up.

Earlier in the day, Dante had said _four days –_ and Vergil had closed his eyes briefly and nodded, Nero had cursed loud and long, and Blue Rose had blasted a molten hole in an approaching Hell Antenora, and that was that.

The first time had been a trifling thing – Nero’s right boot had slipped on a patch of blood-slick ground, and the revolving Chaos he had been holding at bay had skidded past Red Queen’s edge in a shower of sparks. It would have taken a half-inch off his nose, too, if Nero had not blasted it in the face with a shockwave from Gerbera and used the recoil to hurl himself backwards.

Vergil had been there to steady Nero when he landed, and had not missed the telltale tremor of exhaustion in Nero’s shoulder. Then there was the fact that Nero had voiced no cutting denial of Vergil’s aid, only a quiet, panting breath before slipping out from under Vergil’s hand and blurring into motion again.

The second time it happens, Vergil is waiting for it – and so spots the moment Nero takes the full weight of a double Hell Antenora downswing, Red Queen straining against the demon’s massive cleavers – and Vergil moves even as Nero’s ankle buckles under the strain.

Mirage Edge scores sparks against the cleavers’ edge, guiding the blow down and ever-so-slightly to the side so the cleavers pass a handspan from Nero’s wide-eyed face – and Vergil uses the Hell Antenora’s continued momentum to scrape his blade up past the cleavers themselves, amputate both the demon’s arms, and continues the upswing to take off its head.

“Enough,” Vergil says, as he moves to skewer the Hellbat that dares to draw close while Nero plants Red Queen in the ground and staggers to his feet.

“What the hell are you saying?” Nero hisses, in between great gulps of air.

“You need rest,” Vergil continues plainly, drawing a half-circle around Nero to plunge Mirage Edge into a Hell Caina’s throat. “We must each take our turn. Rest. I will guard you.”

“Bullshit,” Nero growls. “I’m not some kid that needs to be looked after–”

Vergil bites back a snarl and snaps towards him. _“Nero._ I have no time for this.”

For a moment, he stands face-to-face with Nero. His son’s eyes stare defiantly up at him, dry and red-rimmed with exhaustion.

Vergil glances at the portal. Another wave of vermin are coming, scuttling through the portal like an endless plague.

This will not do.

“I am aware you fought for near thirteen hours that day in Redgrave City,” Vergil says, fighting to control the mounting frustration in his voice. “But that was with constant reinforcement and moments to rest. By my count, you have yet to have halted in sixteen hours. _Rest._ You will need it.”

Nero’s expression twists. “But–”

Vergil growls, breaking their shared stare as he flings out a fan of bluelit blades to hobble the first line of demons. “We cannot expend any more of our precious energy in dispute. I am willing to take the first turn to rest if you wish it. But we must decide _now._ ”

In the corner of his vision, Nero’s step stutters.

A pause, in which demons scream in a circle about them, pulverized by a half-dozen mirage blades.

“Oh,” Nero says, with a hint of awkwardness. “Okay. I mean– you would– for me–?”

“Yes, I would,” Vergil says shortly, and decides to ignore the traitorous hammering of his heart at the broken-off question. “Now go. Rest.”

Nero does not reply, but begins to move towards the edge of the dome farthest from the portal. The two of them methodically clear the demons that scuttle after, and Vergil spares a raised eyebrow at Dante, who gives them both a wan smile from the other side of the wall.

Vergil watches as Nero sits heavily in the dust by the dome’s edge, Red Queen in his lap, one hand caressing the flat of the blade. Dante crouches behind him on the other side of the wall, unspoken pain etched into the edges of his small smile. There are a precious few seconds to breathe here, with the next wave of demons just beginning to emerge from the rip in the veil.

They watch the oncoming demons for a moment, quietly; just the three of them.

Then Nero shifts, and the breath stutters in Vergil’s chest even as Dante’s surprised intake of breath ricochets across the wall of light.

Vergil stares down at Red Queen, reversed in Nero’s grip, with the hilt held up in offering.

“Now, you take good care of her,” Nero says fiercely, blue eyes shining in the afternoon light. “If I find one scratch on her when I wake, you’re paying for repairs. You know how Nico is.”

No amount of smokescreen could mask the obvious emotion behind the offer, through, and Vergil allows Mirage Edge to dissipate as he reaches out and closes his fingers around Red Queen’s grip.

“I swear I will treat her with the respect she deserves,” Vergil says solemnly. He places Yamato’s sheath at Nero’s side.

Dante, the maudlin idiot, is smiling well and truly now, and Vergil makes a face at him that plainly says _sentimental fool._

Vergil glimpses the tiniest of grins on his son’s features as he spins on the spot to engage the first Hell Caina, Red Queen revving to life under his gloves.

(:~:)

Nero looks so very young like this, curled up asleep with his head pillowed on his filthy coat, thin red undershirt streaked with grime and sweat.

Dante sits as close to his nephew as he can, one scruffy-booted leg half bent in front of him with an arm resting languidly upon his knee, left temple leaning against the cool dark blue light of the dome wall between them. The Devil May Cry van is two paces away, and a part of him is absurdly grateful that Nico has slipped inside and closed the van doors, giving them a quiet space shielded from view of the military line at the far side of the square.

A military line that now also apparently has reporters and cameras, or whatever. Dante cannot bring himself to care.

Nero slumbers on in the dead, loose-limbed sleep of the utterly exhausted, the setting sun casting drifting shadows upon Blue Rose resting loosely under his fingers. For a moment, that smooth, unmarked face and white hair brings Dante forcefully back to his childhood memories of golden late afternoons, waking from a warm, languid nap to find his brother curled on his side much like Nero is now.

Dante almost extends a hand to brush the grime from Nero’s hair before remembering he cannot. He raises his head a little instead, and watches Vergil continue to carve a bloody semicircle four paces wide around the curled form of his son.

At first glance, it would seem that there is no emotion on Vergil’s face except occasional disgust as he eviscerates demon after demon. But to Dante, familiar as he is to his twin’s every expression, every movement, Vergil’s true intentions are an open book.

There is determination fired into the thin line of Vergil’s mouth, challenge in each flourish of Red Queen as it bites into demon flesh. It is as if Vergil has drawn a line around Nero, marked in demon blood and defended only by his own person – as though Vergil is saying one thing with every stroke of his blade: _Do not dare touch him._

“You idiot,” Dante whispers.

It a cruel thing indeed that Vergil’s care for his son is obvious to everyone except himself and Nero.

The sun slips away to its daily death, and the moon rises over Fortuna once more.

(:~:)

Vergil pushes on, a wraith of blue lightning and with a crimson-flamed blade, silhouetted in the light of the rising moon.

A day ago he might have scoffed at the idea of fighting with a blade like Nero’s Red Queen – a sword built for raw power and aggression, so unlike the elegant and precise strikes he favours with the Yamato. But today, here, with wave upon wave of unceasing demons and no time to rest, he is glad for the solid blade in his hand and Nero’s trust in offering it.

The thought that his son trusts him with something so precious as his favoured blade warms his heart, even as he siphons carefully again and again from his core of demon energy, curling it into a small, compressed sphere at his centre, like a man might curl over his only supply of water in an endless desert.

The strain is starting to show itself; in the thinned-out, faraway quality of his demon core, and in the ache of his wrist each time he parries.

Devil Trigger would wipe away his physical exhaustion for a moment, but he dares not use it for fear of depleting his reserves further.

Time slows to a momentary trickle, tinged crystalline blue. Red Queen carves a hissing furrow into a Hell Caina’s head, and the demon lets out a deafening screech as Vergil lobotomises it with a single twist of his wrist.

Vergil spares a quick glance at his son. A small part of him is relieved to see that that Nero is still slumbering on, with Dante’s still, watchful form on the other side of the wall, despite the cacophony. Someone has set up floodlights farther back, beyond the shape of Nicoletta’s van, but Vergil neither has the time nor interest to see whom.

The moonlight has smoothed over Nero’s features, painted him even younger than his years.

Perhaps Vergil should wake him soon, before his own demon core stretches even further, like drops of blood drifting gossamer thin into water.

Nero shifts a little in his sleep. His lips move, forming a single word.

_Kyrie._

Three Furies stalk forward at once, fell yellow eyes glistening in the searing heat of their fire-lined features, eyeing the curled form of Vergil’s son behind him.

Vergil takes a breath that tastes of iron – pushes down memory, of fighting and fighting until the Yamato is ripped from his fingers, three red lights suspended above him as dripping black armour is _sewn_ into his skin, each piece stealing a small part of his soul until he is no longer himself–

A little longer, perhaps.

He will let Nero sleep for a little longer.

(:~:)

Dante’s chin slips off the heel of his hand and he jerks awake abruptly, shaking his head to clear it.

Dammit, he’d dozed off.

The roar of Red Queen and the screech of dying demons still echoes across the square, but there is a deeper, mechanized _thud-thud-thud_ repeating over it all – Dante squints up, and winces as a helicopter searchlight daggers light into his face.

Damned military. Damned cameras.

A quick glance to his left reveals his favourite nephew still sleeping soundly beyond the dome wall, and beyond _that–_

Dante cannot stop the hiss that escapes him as he rolls onto one knee in a half-crouch, staring at the silhouette of his brother, sharply etched into the night by the glow of moonlight and searchlight alike.

Vergil moves almost entirely in a blaze of crimson now, Red Queen a blur in his hands, only the merest whispers of blue mist curling at his feet to lend speed to his strikes. At first glance, it would seem nothing is wrong – the absence of blue blades only a testament to Vergil’s careful conservation of his demon power.

But as Dante watches Vergil wrench Red Queen free of a Hell Atenora’s skull and curl under the flaming arc of a Hell Judecca’s scythe, Dante also notes the brief, blue-tinged flare of Vergil’s demonic aura and hitch in the scythe’s movement that belies a pause in time.

Vergil is drawing on his power to slow time to avoid injury – against demon attacks that he usually would have had time to smirk at before batting aside with a careless flick of his wrist.

Then it happens again a few seconds later with a Fury’s flame-wraught paw, and again, and _again,_ Vergil’s forehead beaded with sweat, and Dante risks a glance upwards again to find the moon truly past its zenith and and beginning its slow descent towards the horizon, and realises with dawning horror that it must be well past midnight, and his brother has been fighting for over twenty-four hours without rest since the dome appeared – against multiple enemies and without the Yamato in his hand.

“Shit,” Dante hisses.

He hammers a fist against the dome wall beside his nephew’s head, and watches with mounting urgency as Nero jerks awake, each movement frustratingly slow.

Dante smashes his fist into the solid light, ignoring the ache crackling across his knuckles. “Dammit, _wake up,_ kid!”

“Mmph,” Nero groans in a voice rough with thirst, rubbing a grimy hand over his face. “Wha – oh.” He stares through the wall of light up at Dante, at the moon high above them, suspended among the early morning stars, and twists to stare at his father’s flickering form.

“Shit,” Nero says, with feeling.

“For once, I totally agree,” Dante growls.

Vergil fights on a few paces away. It is telling of that he has not noticed Nero’s wakening.

Bitter fury flares in Nero’s ice-blue gaze as he scrambles to his feet, tugging his blood-stiff coat over his shoulders. “How long did that dumbass let me sleep? This is bull. I can fight just as well as he can, and he knows it.”

Dante cannot quite stop the surge of disappointment and anger that rushes through him at Nero’s words, and red-yellow embers of demon energy spark out of his fists before he can stop them.

Nero twists to stare at him, already half a step away from the dome edge.

Frustration boils under Dante’s skin. He can feel his devil trigger crawling under his skin, clamoring for release. He wishes he could break through this barrier, grab his brother and nephew, and knock their blockheaded skulls together.

“There isn’t time,” he growls instead. “Get that dumbass to rest before he kills himself trying to give you a few more hours’ sleep.”

Some of the fire seeps from Nero’s expression. It leaves him looking a mixture of stunned and confused, with the tiniest hint of guilt.

Nero moves towards his father, and as the helicopter searchlight washes briefly overhead, Dante raises a hand and flashes the rudest gesture he can think of up at it.

It takes the edge off the convoluted mess that is his thoughts, at least.

(:~:)

Vergil’s existence has narrowed to the Red Queen in his hand and his next opponent – whether Empusa, Fury, Pyrobat, Hell Antenora or any of an endless possession of scum. He stands as the last sentinel before sacred ground behind him, and nothing passes his blade – not even he parries an Empusa’s saw-like jaws only to find a Hell Judecca’s scythe lancing to his left, aiming for the space behind him where he knows Nero is still resting–

Vergil moves before he is fully aware of what he is doing.

As he holds the Empusa at bay with one hand tight on Red Queen’s hilt, he calls on the precious, shallow reserve of his demon power and slows time – enough to press his free hand around the edge of the scythe as it passes towards his left.

The bite of the scythe through the thin leather of his glove and into his palm brings with it a jolt of ice-fed pain, firing adrenaline into his weary limbs as drops of scarlet blood drip down his palm and wrist to scatter like bright crimson coins against the filthy ground.

He revs Red queen once, and the Empusa’s jaw explodes off its head, trailing bits of brain matter with it.

The Hell Judecca leans its full weight into the scythe against Vergil’s left hand, and Vergil grits his teeth against the agony of jagged metal grinding against the bones of his palm–

–and something – _someone_ rips Red Queen from his other hand and beheads the Hell Judecca with a furious yell.

Vergil barely has time to turn his head in shock before a sharp, mechanical _click_ sounds, and a shockwave shudders through his bones as a pure white energy beam the width of his head erupts across the dome, vaporising a swathe of demons at once.

The scythe drops from Vergil’s numb fingers, the cut on his palm healing over near-instantaneously, as he watches Nero flick the twisted remains of the Gerbera to the ground, and snap a Punchline into his elbow with a low curse.

Nero turns burning, icy blue eyes to him, and looks for an instant so like Vergil himself reflected in the shattered mirror of his childhood home that Vergil forgets to breathe.

“Hey, jackass,” Nero hisses, “You might want to get some rest before this kills you.”

Vergil instinctively bristles at that, despite the numb ache in his sword arm that sings with relief at the sudden stop in movement. Mixed with the anger within him is a slow, seeping hurt – that Nero would find his hours of single-minded effort to allow him to rest nothing but an insult.

“I hardly think my life was ever in any danger,” he scoffs, hiding the pain behind this defense much as he brings his sword hand behind his back to hide its telltale shake. He hears Dante’s sharp intake of breath behind him, though, and grits his teeth. Of course Dante would see too much. He always does.

To his surprise, Nero gives him a searching look, glancing at Vergil’s left palm, which still slowly drips blood from his ruined glove despite the healed cut within.

“Just get some rest, will you?” Nero says eventually, as the first of the next wave of demons scuttles closer. “I’ll wake you if I need help.”

That little admission warms Vergil, if only slightly. He almost tells Nero to be careful, but holds his tongue just in time. It would not do to break this tentative accord between them with another insinuation that the might think Nero weak.

Dante is waiting for him with a cocky grin and spread arms, and Vergil scowls at him as he draws closer to the barrier.

“Hey, how’s the old bones doing?” Dante says, all teasing amusement. “Creaking in their joints yet?”

“Shut up,” Vergil says shortly, lowering himself to the ground by the dome wall, hating the way his knees catch as he finally takes his weight off them. For a moment, he simply rests with his back against the wall of light and his head tilted back, eyes closed, breathing. He curls the Yamato’s sheath under his hand, grounds himself to the echo of the Yamato’s song there.

He feels Dante’s presence behind him on the other side of the barrier, that coiled reservoir of demonic energy so much like his own at full power, and knows from the rustle of leather that Dante has mirrored him, so they sit back-to-back with only the thin barrier of light separating him.

“Some day, huh?” Dante says eventually, over the sound of Blue Rose firing and the thud of helicopter blades overhead.

Vergil chuckles once, the dark mirth bubbling up out of his exhausted core to shake his shoulders where they join his aching neck.

“Yes,” he agrees, and leaves it at that.

Dante eventually begins to whistle quietly behind him, a tuneless series of notes that belies Dante’s poor taste in music, and Vergil almost tells him to stop before he feels his battle-tightened muscles slowly relaxing to the quiet sound, so different to the screams of demons and the whir of machinery overhead.

Vergil means to meditate at first, silently reciting the lines of William Blake’s poetry to clear his mind, but soon his chin drops towards his chest, and the world fades to grey mist, with the tuneless melody of his brother’s voice curling around him in the cold night air.

(:~:)

Vergil snaps awake to Nero’s shout.

“Ahhh! _Dammit!”_

Vergil is on his feet, Mirage Edge flaring to full brightness in his free hand, before Dante’s answering shout would have woken him proper.

What he sees clenches an icy hand around his heart and squeezes it fit to burst.

Silhouetted in the early dawn light, Nero twists away from the purple-black greatsword buried in his side, the cyan skin of his devil form blazing about him to seal the spurt of dark blood that erupts from the wound at his side before he reverts to human form, a snarl on his lips.

The Proto Angelo looks dismissively down at Nero’s panting form, and raises its sword overhead as though to strike again as a half-dozen Scudo Angelos close in.

Vergil has thrown open the well of his demon powers and let his full demon form blaze out of his core before before he even registers Dante’s warning shout; he crosses the space between himself and his son in a heartbeat, and the Proto Angelo’s outline blurs as Vergil gathers a sizzling sphere of demonic energy into his hand and sends it blasting into the Proto Angelo’s centre, sending a thundering shockwave exploding outwards.

_Flith. Scum. Foul vermin of Mundus’s creation._

Through the roaring fury in his ears, Vergil hears the howling screams of the Scudo Angelos as the shockwave rips jagged pieces off their silver armour.

Vergil lands light-footed beside his son, allowing his demon form to dissipate into the wind, and nearly staggers in place as the whiplash when his receding demon energy drains into the shallow pool at his core. He notes that the sun is rising over the tops of the buildings on the far side of the square now – he has had a scant few hours’ rest, but it seems that what demonic energy he as replenished in that time was consumed all-too-rapidly by his burst of power.

“Thanks,” Nero says beside him, uncharacteristically quietly, and Vergil spares him a glance as they whirl into battle again as one.

There are shadows under Nero’s eyes now, a cracked quality to his lips. Vergil and Dante require less sustenance than full-blooded humans, but he supposes there too is a limit to Nero’s demon powers. Vergil is suddenly aware of the dryness of his own mouth, the ache in his throat with each even breath.

Even in Hell, there had been sustenance to be found, as foul-tasting as it was. He had not starved or thirsted for water, even in the Underworld.

Not here. There is nothing here – even the broken fountains under the dome have long since dried up.

Vergil feels Nero mirroring him, fusing their fighting styles together into one, like binary planets caught in each others’ orbits – guarding his father’s blind spots where Vergil guards his son’s. Shields shatter under their blades as they battle their way through the Scudo Angelos, leaping over and under and around the purple-fired blade of the Proto Angelo above.

Hordes of demons are pouring out of the portal now, Empusa and Hell Antenora and Pyrobats and Hell Judeccas and Baphomets and Furies and a whole Behemoth, and Vergil hears Nero’s wordless yell behind him as they fight back-to-back now, a sea of demons on all sides like a rising tide threatening to drown them, the Proto Angelo raising its greatsword as though to cleave them apart–

–The tide breaks around them like a storm surge rushing by their feet, and Vergil does not know if he imagines the press of Nero’s back against his, solid and warm and familiar, buttressing him against the tide as he does his son.

They fight on together, wordless, as claws and blades open shallow cuts in their skin and draw arcs of blood that heal near-instantaneously at first, then gradually slow, enough so that their hands turn slick with congealing blood as the sun climbs high into the sky and the oppressive heat burns down on them.

The Proto Angelo crumbles into dust as Mirage Edge and Red Queen plunge into its chest together, then gaps appear between the demons – a terribly slow, gradual thing, until finally Vergil skewers the last hellbat with a mirage blade as he hears Nero’s desperate yell of exhausted victory behind him, turning to see a Fury’s head toppling off its neck to scatter brains across the ground.

The portal shimmers ahead, a few stray Empusa scuttling from it, but none of the hordes of the past hours.

Red Queen clatters to the ground, Nero’s hands and knees following a moment after. Vergil makes to reach him but finds his body betraying him, sending him down on one knee, leaning his full weight on Mirage Edge, plunged tip-first into the blood-slick ground.

Vergil muses – through the sawing of Nero’s breath and Vergil’s own desperate efforts to control his breathing – that it is one thing to fight Dante for two days on end, focusing on one opponent to the exclusion of all else; but it is another thing altogether to face horde upon horde of demons with nowhere to turn, no sustenance, and nothing but the endless rush of oncoming death, again and again with no rest.

“How long?” Nero gasps, face an almost sheet-like white.

The sun blazes above them, well path its zenith and moving towards the West.

Vergil opens his mouth to answer, but then the next, mercifully scattered wave is upon them, and his response is lost as they both stagger to their feet and fight on.

(:~:)

“Forty-one hours,” Nico’s voice sounds from behind Dante.

Dante jerks away from the barrier as he looks at the mug of coffee that appears under his chin. He turns dry, red-rimmed eyes towards Nico, and accepts the cup automatically.

“It feels longer,” Dante says instead, voice hoarse.

“I know,” Nico replies, squatting beside him and pushing up her glasses with one hand. “Whole world’s gone to hell, ain’t it?”

Dante does not have the energy to reply. The slow lethargy that sometimes comes over him in the particularly lonely watches of the night has spread down his limbs again, leaving him desiring nothing and desiring everything at once, formless, useless, each movement of his hands a faraway thing like he is watching it all from somewhere other than his own body.

“Hey,” Nico says, reaching out and tapping his shoulder.

Some of the scalding hot coffee tips out of Dante’s cup and onto his lap, searing through his dirty trousers in a flash of pain that is gone just as quickly, but Dante cannot bring himself to care, even as Nico swears and rushes to apologise.

Then a familiar crystalline voice sounds from somewhere beyond the Devil May Cry Van, and Dante shudders, the world rushing in on him again with forceful clarity, and he throws back the scalding coffee in one long gulp, uncaring for the burn in his throat, throws down the mug to Nico’s protests, and darts around the van in a half-sprint.

Kyrie crashes into his chest halfway around the van, red-gold hair gleaming in the noon sunlight.

Dante hears the clicking of dozens of cameras and raises his head to glare at the scrum of reporters behind the military line twenty metres away, raising a hand to flash every rude gesture he can think of at them. They respond with even _more_ flashing cameras and a thrown question or two, but then Trish steps up to them with lightning in her hands, and the crowd goes quiet.

“Let me go – _let me go,_ Mr Dante–”

There are unshed tears in Kyrie’s soft voice, but also an edge of steel there that reminds Dante so much of his mother that he has to blink away the illusion.

“In here,” Nico is saying, then the van door slides open and they help Kyrie into the van together, sliding the door shut behind them. The heat is stifling in the van, but the clamor of the crowd and the furious sounds of the battle have dulled, at least.

Dante crouches by Kyrie’s side as she breaks down into tears in the privacy the enclosed space affords her.

“Mr Dante,” she says, through hitching sobs. “I have to see him.”

Dante opens his mouth, and closes it again. He wishes once again that it were he in the dome instead of Nero – Nero would know what to do, what words to say. Dante might have a laugh for everyone, friend or foe, easy jokes and jaunty smiles, but in the realm of sympathy and comfort he knows he does only marginally better than Vergil.

“Hey hey hey,” Nico says suddenly, settling next to Kyrie on the narrow couch and pulling her into a hug. “It’s okay, Kyrie. Your boyfriend may be an idiotic lil’ brat but he’s tougher than a behemoth. He’ll get through this just fine.”

“But–”

“You shouldn’t be here, Kyrie,” Dante says softly, and though Nico glares at him he pushes on. “It won’t do you any good to see him, and he can’t have any distractions right now.”

“I know,” Kyrie says through her tears. “I know.”

An audible gasp rises from the crowd outside, and even as Kyrie’s eyes widen and Nico swears, Dante is gone in a flash of crimson embers from the humid heat of the van and pressed against the blue-lit wall of the dome, useless, flaring demon energy seeping from under his coat.

What has just occurred becomes quickly obvious.

Nero is shaking out his right arm with a small, bitter smile, flexing his human fingers as the remains of a Gerbera scatter to the ground at his feet.

But he does not reach to his belt for another devil breaker.

Because he has no more.

Dante watches Nero shrug minutely at Vergil’s questing glance before moving back into the flow of the battle, blue-lit demon arms bursting from his back.

“Aw, hell,” Nico curses softly behind him.

Dante turns on the spot. To his relief, the driver’s side window is only partially lowered, Nico leaning half out of the van, Kyrie nowhere in sight.

They stare at each other for a long, long moment, Nico uncharacteristically quiet.

Then: “Take Kyrie home,” Dante says hoarsely.

“Sure can do, Boss,” Nico replies, with none of her usual cheer. “You’ll be okay on your own?”

Dante quirks a small smile at that, a shadow of his easy smile. “With Lady and Trish to hold back the crowd? Peachy.”

And the afternoon wears on to evening, measured in drops of blood.

(:~:)

Sunrise.

Fifty-four hours in – two and a half days.

Nero raises dry, red-rimmed eyes to meet the rising sun, and feels the urge to laugh bubble up inside him.

Not that he actually laughs. He is breathing too hard to do anything but wheeze.

Blood seeps down his temple from a cut on his hairline, trickling scarlet down his chin to drip onto the hand he presses to the filthy ground. His demon arms have faded into the air – he cannot afford to keep them out, not when what precious demon energy he has remaining is needed for healing and movement. The ragged rents in the back of his coat expose strips of torn skin to the chill morning air.

It will heal. It will all heal – but much, much more slowly than it should, over long minutes instead of seconds.

Vergil is a blurred shadow of motion to Nero’s right. Each elegant movement of Mirage Edge scatters bright, crimson drops into the air from a long slash across Vergil’s chest, knitting together gradually, inch by slow inch, thirty seconds where it should have taken an instant.

Nero presses one hand to the ground, breath haggard, brushing the congealing blood and sweat out of his eyes.

“C’mon, Nero,” Dante’s voice calls from somewhere behind him, raw and agonised and with a low note of fear that clenches around Nero’s gut. “Get up.”

“I’m trying, _dead weight,”_ Nero hisses, staggering to his feet. He regrets the words the moment they tumble out of his mouth, but even as he half-stumbles towards the nearest demon and blasts two new holes in its face with Blue Rose, loaded with its last clip of ammo, Nero spares a glance over his shoulder to find Dante half bent with guilt at the dome wall, one hand curled against the barrier as though he has just slammed a fist into it.

“Dammit, I didn’t mean–” Nero croaks through his dry throat. “I just–”

“Leave it,” Vergil hisses as he moves closer, the two of them falling into a familiar pattern now, saving movement, guarding each other’s backs. “There will be time for sentiment later. For now, survive.”

Survive.

_Survive…_

Blue Rose runs out of ammo midnight that night, seventy-two hours in, and Nero is so, so tired by that point that it only registers when the gun clicks uselessly in his hand, and he watches the Fury’s jaws gape wide over his head, his dodge far too slow, his demon form out of reach.

_I’m sorry, Kyrie._

Then there is a blur of blood-streaked black leather in front of him, and Vergil grunts in agony as the Fury’s jaws snap shut over his left arm, jagged teeth grinding into bone and flesh with a horrible _crack._

Dante’s shout echoes out somewhere far, far away, somewhere near the endless vault of stars that is the sky and the floodlights that blind from above, and Red Queen moves in Nero’s hand, the pain in his wrist mirroring his wordless scream as he jams the blade in the Fury’s burning yellow eye.

Vergil tears his arm out of the Fury’s slackening jaws with an agonised shout that melds with the Fury’s roar – so loud and so not _Vergil_ that Nero almost freezes there and then – drops the Yamato’s sheath, reaches up with his ruined arm, wraps his bloodied fingers around Nero’s on Red Queen’s hilt, and revs Red Queen once.

The Fury’s head explodes.

Red Queen plunges into the ground, both Nero and Vergil’s hands still wrapped around the hilt, blood-slick fingers intertwined.

Nero finds himself kneeling with his brain-spattered face no more than a handspan from Vergil’s ruined arm, with a jagged end of a white bone poking up through Vergil’s tattered sleeve, blood cascading down to the ground below.

“Shit,” he whispers, as his empty stomach clenches.

The next wave of demons begins to scuttle out of the portal ahead.

“Nero.”

The word is the merest susurration of air.

Nero turns to his father, whose hand is trembling where it wraps around Nero’s on Red Queen’s hilt.

“You need to…you need to set the bones, or my arm will not heal correctly,” Vergil whispers, lips white, pale eyes somehow bleached further of colour. “I cannot do it myself.”

“What do I...” Nero says swallowing against his dry throat.

“Pull…my wrist...one way, and my elbow another,” Vergil says. “It does not matter if it is not exact. I will heal. Quickly. We have no time.”

Nero pauses, watching the moonlight glisten off the sickly white of bone.

Nero’s arm had looked much the same, the raw, torn ends of bone stark white against the fountain of blood gushing onto his garage floor, when Vergil had taken his Devil Bringer from him.

_“Nero. Now.”_

Nero fixes one trembling hand around his father’s wrist, the other around the elbow, and _pulls._

Vergil howls into Nero’s shoulder, one awful, long-drawn scream, breath hot against Nero’s neck, then the Lusachia are upon them and Vergil has heaved Nero to his feet with his good hand, Mirage Edge flickering to life in his palm the moment it leaves Nero’s arm.

Nero does not know if he glimpses or imagines Dante’s curled form against the barrier a little ways off, head in his hands, silhouetted by dozens of camera flashes behind him.

Then his father is at his back, and Red Queen is in his hand, and he _survives._

(:~:)

The first time one of them is run clean through, there are screams from the crowd beyond the barrier.

The sun falls slowly from its zenith.

Eighty-seven hours. Three and a half days in.

Vergil had used Beowulf to leap in front of his son where he could no longer conjure mirage blades, and the Proto Angelo had rammed its greatsword in Vergil’s chest up to the hilt.

Nero screams. Or hears Dante scream. He doesn’t know which, anymore.

Vergil coughs once, scattering droplets of blood that sizzle on the flaming purple sword buried in his chest, and slides off the blade as the Proto Angelo raises its sword again in preparation for the killing blow.

Nero feels something break within him.

It is a shattering he has not felt in a long time – the howling, bitter rage of an orphan child surging up from the depths of memory, when he had been given worth only for his white hair and its similarity to Sparda, when he had been shunned by all except Kyrie and her family.

When he had wished so desperately for a father.

Then everything that had happened since, until the Qliphoth, and finding out that the same monster that stole his arm was his jerk of a father–

Nero would not let his father die. Not for Nero. Not like this.

The same surge of emotion rises up within him as it did on the roots of the Qliphoth, knowing that he might lose his father or his uncle or both.

It draws on reserves of demon energy he did not know he had, flares white-hot wings from his back, turns his hands to claws and washes his skin into cyan, and the Proto Angelo howls in agony as Nero – cerulean energy cascading in thundering waves from his full demon form – rips the greatsword from the demon’s grip and thrusts it straight down through the Proto Angelo’s mouth and into its chest.

The Proto Angelo collapses into sable dust, but Nero is already turning to the next demon, then the next, all formal fighting technique gone, death in his claws and swords in his winged arms.

He catches glimpses, through his blinding rage. Glimpses of Dante, in full demon form, hammering fist after flaming fist uselessly into the barrier, screaming his brother’s name.

Nero collapses to his hands and knees by his father’s side in a dome momentarly empty of opponents, the last of his demon energy slipping out of him like dreamsand between his fingers, and nearly sobs with relief when Vergil coughs once, weakly, and struggles to sit up, blue-black scales glittering around the wound in his chest as it knits itself slowly back together.

“Dad,” Nero whispers, as his vision greys at the edges.

Vergil looks at him, a stunned expression on his features.

Nero realises he has spoken aloud.

They stare at each other, father and son, as the portal disgorges yet another group of demons.

In the blazing noon heat, the scent of death heavy around them, Vergil’s eyes glisten with something other than the sunlight. There is something like a wild sort of joy in his face – it makes him look ten years younger, wipes the exhaustion from his features.

 _“Sweet dreams, form a shade,”_ Vergil whispers.

Nero stares at him. _Blake,_ his mind supplies, but he has no breath to wonder further.

Still wearing the same expression of stunned joy, Vergil staggers to his feet. The wound in his chest flashes blue as it knits over completely. He takes a single step to his left to place himself solidly between the line of oncoming Hell Antenora and Nero. The ghostly outline of Mirage Edge flickers in his hand for a moment, then dissipates, wavering outline too weak to maintain its form.

Vergil blinks down at his empty hand, and Beowulf’s greaves and gauntlets shimmer into place a moment before the first cleaver comes down, shattering on Vergil’s left greave.

Nero looks up at Vergil, then, and wonders when his father had begun to love him.

The thought allows him to wrap numb fingers around Red Queen’s hilt and use the sword to push himself to his feet.

He staggers up next to his father, step slowly steadying, sword in hand, and fights not only for himself – but for Vergil, too. For their future as father and son, and for all they have missed together.

And the afternoon wears on until nightfall.

(:~:)

This new, shared knowledge between them spurs them on until just past midnight.

Four days. Mere minutes before the dome will fall, by Nico’s calculations.

The world has slowed to but a dream, now. Vergil sees nothing but his son – more blood visible than skin, one broken arm dangling uselessly at his side, Red Queen flashing in his one good hand.

Vergil himself feels his heart thudding painfully with every movement with Beowulf, shuddering with his thrumming heart as cuts open up on his skin – his back, his limbs, his forehead, glancing hits from demons he can no longer fully dodge.

Two ghosts dancing a broken, necromancer’s dance in the silver moonlight, broken forms pale under the torn rags of their clothing, dripping blood ever-so-slowly to the hungry earth to mix in the churned mud under their feet.

There is a moment when they crush one last Riot’s head as one, Beowulf greave against the flat of Red Queen’s blade, and Nero overcompensates and stumbles over Red Queen and against Vergil. They fall to their knees in the dust together, Vergil trying unsuccessfully to support Nero’s weight, an arm around Nero’s side, and they rest there for a few heartbeats, both staring at the portal’s shimmering depths as if daring anything else to come through.

Then the world plays a cruel trick on them.

Vergil feels Nero’s breath hitch against his shoulder as a giant, shaggy hand emerges from the portal, followed by another, then four beady eyes set in a snarling face.

 _“What dread hand and what dread feet,”_ Vergil murmurs, as the goliath emerges fully, towering above them, blinking fell eyes at the starry sky above, the glittering dome and the floodlights beyond.

A cruel, cruel twist of fate.

Gasps from those observing rise into the night air from the edges of the square.

Dante screams once behind them, an exquisitely raw sound of denial.

Vergil has never heard Dante sound like this – not at Temen-ni-gru. Not even as Nelo Angelo, or as V, or on the Qliphoth.

 _“If thought is life, and strength and breath,”_ he whispers, as clearly as though his book of poetry is in his hands, and feels Nero shift against him.

Vergil does not know where he finds the strength to pull Red Queen from Nero’s fingers, or what allows him to stand, though Nero fumbles at his wrist as though trying to stop him.

The Goliath looks down at him, opens the slavering maw in its abdomen.

Vergil’s vision greys at the edges, and he knows he cannot take another step, or he will fall. He sways a little in the night air, takes a breath–

–and uses the last of his strength to hurl Red Queen like a lance towards the Goliath’s face.

The Goliath plucks the blade from the air like a metal toothpick, examines it for a moment with cruel intelligence in its eyes, and, in a blindingly fast movement, reaches down and plunges Red Queen directly through Vergil’s gut.

Nero screams, a ragged, broken sound.

Vergil looks down at the blade in his abdomen, at the blood sluggishly seeping from its edges, and feels no pain at all.

He falls.

His head smashes against the ground, and Red Queen comes to rest hilt-first against the stone.

Hand at his face, sword calluses against his cheekbone. Someone is cradling his head, as the goliath’s enormous, furred shape blocks out the light of the moon overhead.

“Dad,” someone is whispering, as a hand finds his, blood-slick fingers curling around his own as a figure curls over him, shielding him with their own body. White hair brushes his forehead.

_Nero._

The scent of blood, and smoke, and his son’s warm hand in his rapidly cooling palm.

Vergil attempts to raise a hand to push his son to safety – to allow whatever comes to strike him alone.

He fails. Nero clings to him, hair brushing his cheek, one good arm wrapped tightly around Vergil’s chest, and Vergil feels incredibly, wonderfully warm.

Then a whisper of air, as the dome vanishes.

Noise and heat and light explode above; Dante is screaming, crimson energy blasting from his full demon form, and the goliath is gone from Vergil’s sight as suddenly as an eyeblink, and the stars are suddenly there, wheeling above and close enough to touch.

If there is one thing Vergil regrets – here, in what must be his final moments – he regrets all the time he had wasted not knowing his son.

“Nero,” he murmurs, into the grey emptiness. His sight is all but gone, and all he feels is his son’s hand in his, tightening desperately around his fingers.

He hopes it is enough, and that Nero understands.

Vergil closes his eyes.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Stay tuned tomorrow for part 2, where I pour in as much brotherly and father-son mush as possible to make up for what I did to them in this chapter. I am sustained by comments, and will gladly scream with you about our disaster demon family. See you soon.
> 
> Poetry quotes:
> 
> A Cradle Song-  
> "Sweet dreams, form a shade  
> O’er my lovely infant’s head!  
> Sweet dreams of pleasant streams  
> By happy, silent, moony beams!"
> 
> The Tyger-  
> "And, when thy heart began to beat,  
> What dread hand and what dread feet?"
> 
> The Fly-  
> "If thought is life  
> And strength and breath,  
> And the want  
> Of thought is death;"


	2. And Watered Heaven With Their Tears

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> In which I serve up sickeningly sweet tooth-rotting fluff to make up for the 14000 words of unmitigated angst.
> 
> Music for this chapter: _Snow_ \- Zion.T

The stars, a silken scarf across the velvet sky–

Nero’s hands curling in his father’s coat–

Blood-slick fingers in broken cloth, screaming, screaming as his father closes his eyes–

Goliath, collapsing into dust–

Dante, a single, solitary flame, the Yamato in hand–

The veil between worlds sewn closed, shocking stillness across the square–

Dante’s demon claws fading to human hands, wrapping gently around Nero’s chest, pulling him away from Vergil’s still form–

Nero screaming, thrashing, sobbing, Dante’s raw, low voice murmuring words Nero cannot understand into his ear–

An arm around Nero’s shoulders and another under his knees, weightlessness, the scent of fresh embers and old demon blood and rough crimson leather against his cheek–

Blinding lights, familiar voices, warm, soft blanket–

Then nothing.

(:~:)

The sun rises, climbs wearily towards its zenith–

–then falls again, slipping below the horizon, as the stars burn bright above.

(:~:)

_Flame._

Vergil feels as though he is surrounded by nothing but fire; he gasps for breath with lungs that burn with each inhale, tongue too swollen to ask for water, and when he chances to open his eyes finds the world too bright with flame, drawing precious drops of moisture from the corners of his eyes.

A familiar, sword-calloused hand at the back of his neck, cool fingers on his burning skin; a glass at his mouth, blessedly cold liquid slipping between his lips to run down his parched throat. But he is so desperate that he gulps down too much, finds himself suddenly drowning, and he folds in on himself – coughing, his half of his mother’s amulet sticking to the clammy skin of his collarbone, swollen eyes squeezed shut, as a steady arm supports his shoulders and a sweep of hair not his own brushes his forehead.

Vergil takes a wheezing, rattling breath, curling into the steadiness of this familiar presence at his back, and smells the scent of fresh embers, faint alcohol, black coffee. A scruffy-bearded chin scratches his forehead as the hand tucks his aching head into a cool shoulder.

He has a feeling he should know this constant, supporting presence, but the world is nothing but a blur, and each breath an exhausted struggle, so Vergil gives up on trying to think it through and falls down, down into the comforting darkness.

(:~:)

When Vergil next wakes, he is so incredibly comfortable he cannot bring himself to open his eyes.

Dark, blessed quiet.

He floats there for an indeterminate time, a gentle breeze ruffling through his hair, the mattress soft against his aching body. There is a warm weight at the centre of his chest, rising and falling along with his breathing.

It takes a gargantuan effort to open his eyes – each sliver of light a battle – and finds himself looking at an unfamiliar ceiling painted robin’s-egg-blue. He blinks slowly, unhurriedly.

He becomes aware of another’s breaths, and dips his chin down towards his chest with a languid movement.

Vergil’s eyes widen.

Dante slumbers on, one ear pressed to the blankets directly above Vergil’s heart, uncombed white hair spread messily over the covers. Dark shadows smudge his lower eyelids, and his beard has grown a day or two beyond its usual roguishly unshaven look into that of a wandering hobo. He has slid almost entirely off the chair beside the bed, worn cotton shirt a little small for him, faded red against white-painted wood. The Yamato rests sheathed beside the bed, propped up against the bedside table.

The chamber is painted varying shades of blue and white, and sunlight filters through gauzy cream curtains fluttering in a gentle breeze, drifting across the crisp white sheets, stopping at the edge of Dante’s fan of untidy hair.

Vergil’s limbs are too heavy to shift. He opens his mouth, but finds his throat too dry to speak.

He closes his eyes briefly in frustration. His thoughts have not yet fully ordered themselves – there is _something_ important that has happened, but his head still aches if he casts his memory back further than the last few moments.

Watching Dante drool onto the coverlet, ear pressed to Vergil’s chest, Vergil wonders…

He takes a long, slow, breath, exhales carefully, and waits, chest still.

It takes a moment. Black spots begin to dance before Vergil’s vision after a mere few seconds, and he wonders if he has made a mistake–

Dante’s eyes fly open, and he has one hand clenched around Vergil’s wrist at the pulse-point and the other grasping his shoulder with bruising strength before Vergil can do much more than gasp in his long overdue breath.

They stare at each other across the same horizontal plane, Vergil’s chest quietly heaving with the exhausted effort of holding his breath, Dante’s red-rimmed gaze searching, a little wild – melting into an almost painful relief.

“Shit, Vergil,” Dante whispers. “Don’t scare me like that.”

Vergil screws his eyes shut, his breath coming in quick, short gasps now. Holding his breath had been a _terrible_ idea – one he manifestly regrets.

The sharp scrape of chair against floorboards. The mattress dips by Vergil’s side as Dante’s arm slides under Vergil’s back, guiding him upright. To Vergil’s shame, his head lolls against Dante’s shoulder, his neck as pliant and weak as the rest of him as he chokes in each breath with hitching effort.

He hates this. He hates all of this.

Forcing himself to draw slower, even breaths, Vergil tilts his head back on Dante’s shoulder with enormous struggle and skewers his brother with his most venomous glare.

A wide, brilliant smile spreads on Dante’s face. “Ah, there’s my grouchy idiot of a brother,” he says. “I knew you’d pull through.’’

Vergil furrows his brow. There is a clue there, in Dante’s words – a clue as to how he ended up here, exhausted in this unfamiliar room, with his demon powers the merest hum at his core where they should be a furnace–

Memory rushes in all at once, like searing starfire into his still-healing bones, and his stomach clenches with the phantom pain of Red Queen slicing through his abdomen in cold, frozen metal.

 _Nero._ His son.

Vergil’s hands scrabble uselessly across a few meagre inches of the coverlet towards Dante. He opens his mouth, wheezes two unintelligible syllables from lips too cracked to form coherent sounds.

“Nero’s fine!” Dante says hurriedly, fingers closing tightly across Vergil’s palm. “He’s fine,” he repeats, softer, and Vergil stares up at him, the words dissipating ever-so-slowly across his scarred mindscape, like variegated ink seeping into water.

Dante’s fingers slip out of his, and Vergil feels a traitorous twinge of denial at the loss of warmth, but then Dante’s hand returns at the edge of his vision, bearing a glass of clear water, and Vergil is too grateful for the liquid slipping over his swollen tongue to care for the humiliation.

Dante’s wrist is iron under Vergil’s fumbling grasp, controlling the tilt of the glass despite his near-desperation, and all too soon the glass is set aside and Vergil finds himself blinking slowly, exhausted.

He feels as though he has a lake in his stomach, pushing agianst the fabric of his sleevless shirt.

“So yeah, Nero’s fine. Kyrie’s looking after him,” Dante is saying now, all easy blather again, but with an odd note in his voice that has Vergil straining to look up at his brother. “He woke up scr– uh, _asking_ after you, too. Wouldn’t stop trying to get out of bed until Kyrie told him you were doing okay.”

“He has…fully healed?” Vergil whispers, voice rough with disuse.

Dante nods, the movement a brush of his untrimmed beard against Vergil’s hairline. “Still weak as a Nidhogg hatchling and about as noisy to boot, but fully healed. Just needs rest, like his old man.”

Vergil cannot fully see Dante’s expression from this angle, but notes with a frown that Dante has curled in on himself a little, despite the arm he has around Vergil’s shoulders. As though he is carrying a hidden weight. Almost…guilt.

Vergil opens his mouth to speak on it, but then Dante is jabbering again, a mile a minute like he always has from the moment they first learnt to speak, and then there is something about food and Dante leaves him carefully sat up in bed and buttressed on all sides by a mountain of pillows, and fairly rushes out of the room before Vergil can do more than weakly protest.

Food comes in the form of a tray in Kyrie’s hands, and Vergil feels heat rise on his cheeks when it becomes apparent she is prepared to help him eat where his arms still tremble to bear their own weight. Then he considers that the alternative would be _Dante_ feeding him, and decides that this is the preferable option.

And Kyrie somehow keeps him at ease with her light, laughter-filled conversation, despite the fact they have not met more than half a dozen times, and never without Nero’s watchful eyes staring at Vergil as though daring him to make a wrong move.

_Nero._

Nero’s absence gnaws at Vergil like a missing limb. Though Kyrie’s presence is a comfort – knowing she would not leave Nero if he were in any danger.

“Thank you,” Vergil murmurs, as she stands, empty tray in hand. He is almost surprised to find he means it.

“You’re welcome,” she says, smiling radiantly at him. “Is there anything else you need?”

“No, thank you.”

She helps him settle back into the cocoon of blankets, and he realises belatedly as she closes the door behind her that this must be a spare room in she and Nero’s home, and winces inwardly at another debt owed to his son, on top of all that he needs to repay his son already.

Despite his fatigue, he waits a while, to see if Dante will return.

When the door stays firmly shut, Vergil refuses to admit to himself that he is almost disappointed.

(:~:)

The days pass at a languid, golden pace.

Though at first gratified to find his demon core slowly recovering, like a muscle held taut too long slowly knitting new fibres, Vergil finds himself growing increasingly frustrated with the slow pace at which he regains his physical strength.

He snaps at Dante a few times – usually when Vergil is too humiliated that he has to be half-carried to the bathroom across the room, or angry at the mess he makes when he attempts to eat by himself, or missing Nero terribly but not voicing it, or bitterly disappointed at his own almost plaintive wish that Dante would stay beside him instead of only slipping into the room to aid Vergil in tasks he cannot do himself.

There is a cautiousness to Dante’s touch now that had been absent upon Vergil first waking. Dante – who had always so loved to invade Vergil’s personal space since they were children, and after their return from Hell had so often braved the threat of the Yamato’s blade to throw a casual arm around him or nuzzle a bristly face into his neck when tipsy after drinks with Lady and Trish – Dante now only touches Vergil when absolutely necessary, fingers loose upon his wrist and another hand lightly supporting his back, and Vergil–

Vergil doesn’t fully understand why he hates it.

He simply knows he _does_ , and that confusion only makes him snap all the more often at his brother, and when Dante actually _flinches_ at one particularly bad outburst, Vergil nearly opens his mouth to apologise – but then Dante is barking another easy laugh, a smile crinkling the skin around his too-bright eyes, and Vergil is pressed into silence by the sheer emotional weight of Dante’s forced cheer.

It doesn’t help that Vergil is barely sleeping, either.

Nero comes to him in the night as a wraith in his dreams, a gaping hole in Nero’s chest where his heart should be, both arms uselessly mangled, legs twisted and torn. Vergil sprints to him every night, in the same, hopeless dream, only for the light to die in Nero’s eyes the moment Vergil falls to his knees by his son’s side.

And Vergil would wake, chest heaving, drenched in cold sweat, teeth clenched tight around the scream he would not release.

It is a skill he learnt from his time in captivity under Mundus – to hide his weaknesses even in slumber.

Then Dante comes up to Vergil’s room in full battle gear on the fourth day after his waking to tell him that a hunt was on and that Dante would be gone for most of the night – and Dante joints Vergil’s dreams that night with Nero, both dead and gone by the time his dream self stumbles to their bodies.

Vergil wakes in the early hours of the morning, shivering hopelessly, with the singular, irrational thought that he has to see his son.

He pushes aside the blankets with numb, fumbling hands, and sits up with difficulty – an effort that leaves him wheezing on the side of his bed, hands pressed to either side of his long cotton trousers, blinking the grey spots out of his vision.

It is here that Vergil notices, with the hazy dissociation of the utterly exhausted, that there is a shadow under the crack of the bedroom door where the moonlight pools from the window to lap against the doorframe itself.

It is a shadow cast by something – or someone – leant directly against his door.

But there is not even the merest whisper of dangerous demonic energy from that direction.

It does not matter. Not when he has to see his son.

Vergil takes a deep breath that wipes some – not all – of the spots from his vision, and stands in one smooth motion.

The floor rushes up to meet his face, and he cannot quite stop the choked cry that escapes him as his forehead smashes into the wood, a long cut opening on his brow from a gap between the floorboards.

His door flies open, and Dante tumbles through headfirst, shower-damp hair flying haphazardly about his face.

Even as Dante scrambles towards him on hands and knees, Vergil stares, because _how long has Dante been sitting on the other side of his door?_

“Vergil, you dumbass,” Dante growls as he peels Vergil halfway off the floor and holds him close, running a thumb over the slowly knitting cut on Vergil’s forehead.

Vergil does not reply immediately, because the feeling of his brother’s arms around his shuddering, sleep-deprived form is such a sweet relief that he finds himself turning his face into Dante’s shoulder despite knowing he would regret the humiliation later.

“Verge?” Dante’s voice is vibrating through Vergil’s cheek, now, sounding increasingly concerned.

“I needed to see Nero,” Vergil whispers, and the admission nearly unmakes him right here and now – the voicing of his first and greatest desire, in the presence of his second, no less great, weakness.

Dante’s hold tightens around him. “I know,” he says, “I know you miss him, even if he’s just down the hall. Nero’s safe. Kyrie’s got him.”

“It…it isn’t…so simple,” Vergil breathes into Dante’s shirt, shivering in the chill night air. “The nights – I’ve not– I haven’t–”

One of Dante’s hands vanishes from Vergil’s side, and Vergil automatically curls closer, to his shame – but then there is a rustle of sheets and Dante has pulled the thick comforter from the bed and wrapped it around the two of them, trapping their shared body heat under the same warm quilt.

“You should have told me you weren’t sleeping, Verge.” There is an aching, tired note to Dante’s voice that shouldn’t be there, and Vergil spares an assessing glance at his brother.

The shadows under Dante’s eyes have only grown larger in the past few days, and there is the ghost of pain under Dante’s ever-teasing smile.

“You’re not sleeping either,” Vergil says with slow realisation, and Dante looks away, damp white hair falling over his features.

A pause.

 _“Have you been keeping guard outside my door?”_ Vergil hisses, and he cannot help the edge in his voice now, at the insinuation of his weakness. In a way, though, he is absurdly glad for the quilt. It has cocooned them both, now, and Dante cannot push him away no matter what Vergil says.

Dante’s lips twist. “Stop being such a pompous jackass. Not everything is about your power–”

“–Then why the hell are you doing it, then?” Vergil half-yells, only to realise at the last moment that he might wake Nero, and settling for glaring at his brother instead as Dante folds in half.

 _“I CAN’T STOP SEEING YOU DEAD!”_ Dante fairly screams into the quilt by Vergil’s shoulder, voice muffled by a mouthful of cloth.

Vergil stops breathing, heart hammering fit to burst in his chest.

Dante raises his head.

They stare at each other, Vergil shocked to silence, furious tears welling at the corners of Dante’s eyes.

“Every time I close my eyes,” Dante says – and Vergil realises his brother is folding himself carefully close to him, holding him tightly without resting his weight on him – “Every time I close my eyes, I see you dead. Or Nero dead, but mostly you, because you got stabbed _twice,_ you dumbass, and I wasn’t there to stop it, and I will never stop paying for that for as long as I live.”

A pause, in which the moonlight reflects across two white-haired heads curled tight about each others’ shoulders.

“I haven’t been sleeping,” Vergil whispers into Dante’s thin cotton shirt, “because I’ve been seeing Nero dead. And then when you told me you were leaving for demon-hunting tonight, your corpse joined his.”

Dante’s shoulders hitch in a hiccupping sob. “Shit.”

Then: “I’m sorry,” Dante sniffs.

“It was not any fault of yours that you could not come to our aid,” Vergil says, fingers finally warm as they curl into Dante’s hair and rest at the back of his neck. _“_ _They watch me, those informers to the Fates; Called Fortune, Chance, Necessity, and Death.”_

Dante snorts, breath warm against Vergil’s collar. “C’mon, you’ve gotta stop it with Blake, Vergil.”

“Wilfred Owen,” Vergil corrects, and feels Dante laugh for real, ear brushing against Vergil’s, arms shaking around his back.

They rest like so for a long while, safe in each other’s hold, cocooned in a single quilt much like they used to as children, when they would spend half a day hating each other over some inconsequential quarrel and then throw a tantrum if their mother gave them separate blankets at bedtime.

Vergil would have quite contentedly stayed like so for eternity if his joints do not begin to protest.

He shifts a little, and feels Dante shake himself awake, breaking off halfway through a snore.

“Pig,” Vergil says, not quite able to stop the fondness from seeping into his voice.

“Stuck-up fancy-schmancy dumbass,” Dante says, helping him up. “C’mon, you need to rest. We can see what we can manage with Nero in the morning.”

When Dante helps him settle back in bed, though, Vergil curls his fingers tight about the quilt where they have left Dante’s side. He will not ask, if Dante does not offer.

Dante stares at him for a moment, then snorts a laugh.

“Shove over,” he says, and gamely pushes Vergil to the other side of the bed, hogging an obscene number of the pillows for himself as he climbs in and pulls the comforter over them both.

Vergil clubs his brother in the face with a pillow with somewhat less strength than he would have liked, and rolls his eyes with mock exasperation as Dante does an excellent impression of his drunk persona and snuggles up to Vergil’s neck with his itch-inducing stubble.

They fall asleep proper as the sun begins to rise, turning the silvery moonlight on the room wall to spun gold.

When Kyrie finds them in the morning, her hands go to her mouth to cover her smile – and Nico, having come to visit, gapes, whips out her phone, and promptly takes three dozen photos from different angles.

Vergil and Dante sleep on, dreamless.

(:~:)

When, that afternoon, Dante pronounces Vergil “Maybe kinda sorta okay to sit out a bit” Vergil is so caught up in the opportunity to leave his lonely little room with its unending procession of kindness and gentleness and understanding that he staggers eagerly to the stairs under Dante’s hold, and even subjects himself to the humiliation of needing to be carried down the stairs themselves.

Two days ago, he would have balked at the idea and resigned himself to another lonely afternoon, but with a good night of sleep with Dante using him as a hot-water-bottle, Vergil finds Dante’s steady hold more of a comfort than anything else.

Not that he’d ever admit that on pain of death, but, well.

Vergil is wheezing a little by the time they make it to the garden, and Dante has a concerned expression hidden there under his teasing smile – but Vergil makes a pointed glare that plainly says _if you take this from me then your life is forfeit,_ and his brother settles him on the tall-backed bench facing Kyrie’s neat little rows of tulips without another word.

Dante tucks the heavy woolen throw tighter around Vergil’s shoulders, produces his first-edition Wilfred Owen out of nowhere – Dante had most definitely gone back to the Devil May Cry shop to get it with the Yamato, the sneaky little thief – but Vergil is so looking forward to a quiet afternoon in the sunshine with poetry in his hands and his brother at his side that he does not have the heart to yell at Dante about it.

Well. He will just have to thrash his brother soundly when he is well and they can spar again.

But then Dante bounces back into the house with a quick word to wait, and Vergil’s feels a dawning sense of betrayal when he hears Kyrie and Nero’s voices growing steadily closer, and Dante’s joining them.

Vergil is not– he is not ready for this.

As much as he had wanted to see his son, in the desperate, overwhelming moments after his nightmares, facing his son _now_ with all that transpired between them in their four-day journey of blood and sacrificeis not something he is in any way prepared for.

And Dante has the _gall_ to spring this on him–

Vergil narrows his eyes. He is going to make Dante _suffer_ for this.

Nero’s chuckle is a low, light-filled thing that strikes directly at Vergil’s heart.

And then Nero appears, one arm thrown over Dante’s shoulders for support, wrapped in a flannel bathrobe, unshaven so bits of white hair stick haphazardly out of his chin, fluffy blue slippers embroidered with the words _I love my girlfriend <3_ on his feet–

Vergil stares at his son.

Nero stops laughing quite abruptly when he catches sight of Vergil, and somehow manages to blanch and turn red at the same time, turning his face a patchy, pinched white while his ears flame brilliant, tomato red.

Dante looks between the two of them with a beatific smile and dumps Nero unceremoniously next to his father on the bench.

“Kyrie’s making hot chocolate,” Dante says happily, and bounces back into the house with a skip in his step when Vergil and Nero skewer him with identical, narrow-eyed glares.

The afternoon sunlight filters over them both, suffuses Vergil’s aching limbs with warmth.

Father and son stare at the rows of tulips in silence.

It is terribly quiet here, in the idyllic peace of the garden, with nothing but snatches of occasional birdsong to distract Vergil from the sound of his son’s quiet breathing.

Each breath, so utterly, beautifully _alive._

Vergil’s fingers clench tight around the poetry volume in his hands. In the corner of his vision, Nero opens his mouth and closes it again, twice in rapid succession.

Carefully, Vergil glances to his right, assessing his son in the corner of his vision. Nero appears quite well, if a little thin, faint smudges of shadow under his eyes that suggests poor sleep, though, and a resolute frown at the corner of his lips. Nero is doing the same thing Vergil is – sharp blue eyes taking in the tired tilt of Vegil’s shoulders, as though searching for remaining injury. Nero’s hands are worrying at the flannel of his opposite sleeves, much as Vergil’s thumbs are growing white on the book his own hands.

It is this little detail – Nero’s hands, both healthy and whole and clean and unbroken, that allows speech to bubble up through Vergil’s lips.

“I am glad to see you well,” Vergil murmurs, looking away as he says so, and feels Nero tense beside him.

A heartbeat, where Vergil’s old fears of Nero pushing him away rise to the forefront of his thoughts, leaving him almost dizzy with a mixture of self-hatred and anxiety.

Then: “You’re looking better,” Nero says, in halting starts and stops. “I– I mean, better than the last time I uh. Saw you.”

A moment, where they both remember the thundering retort of the goliath falling above, the slow seep of Vergil’s blood into the dirt, Nero curled over his father’s chest in one last, desperate effort to shield him.

The memory strikes silence into the air between them again. It is yet too fresh, too vivid, the regret too bitter on Vergil’s tongue.

An angry buzzing sounds to Vergil’s right, and he turns slowly to find Nero making a face at the wasp that circles his head, raising a hand to swat at it but not quite succeeding.

Vergil takes a breath, draws on the shallow, cracked pool of blue-lit energy within him, and conjures a tiny toothpick-like blade of blue light that spears the wasp from the air.

Nero inhales sharply beside Vergil as Vergil closes his eyes against his sudden splitting headache.

“Hey,” Nero is saying, and there is a hand on Vergil’s wrist, where the too-rapid pulse hammers against his skin.

Vergil forces open his eyes as the headache fades to a dull throb, and meets his son’s gaze.

A moment, in which neither of them speak, and Nero’s gaze drops, and his hand loosens on Vergil’s wrist though Nero is about to turn away again–

Vergil’s fingers reverse in an almost frantic motion to clasp the edge of Nero’s escaping sleeve, his fingers just brushing the back of Nero’s wrist – the same wrist that had hung useless and shattered in those last desperate hours in the dome.

Nero freezes.

Then, because Vergil is quietly terrified that this will be all they are forever – silent, unspeaking, a chasm of blood and pain between them – he steels himself and speaks.

“If I had to do it again,” he whispers, “All of it, in order that you might live, I would do so.”

Nero does not respond except to turn his head to the side, hiding his face, but a moment later Vergil hears something that might have been a muffled sniff.

“Thanks, Dad,” Nero says, so quietly that Vergil almost misses it.

And then, suddenly, they are fine.

The afternoon sunlight seems suddenly twice as clear than before, pollen drifting between the multicoloured tulips swaying to the breeze, slow bumblebees wandering in meaningless patterns over the emerald grass.

_The skylark and thrush,_

_The birds of the bush,_

_Sing louder around_

_To the bells’ cheerful sound–_

Vergil allows himself a smile. Blake.

Dante apparently chooses this moment to barge in on this tranquil peace, two steaming cups of hot chocolate in his hands, which he pushes into his brother and nephew’s hands without preamble.

“Drink,” Dante says, pulling off his thin cotton shirt in the warm afternoon sunlight and collapsing in a tangle of messy limbs in the empty space on Vergil’s left, sighing contentedly and allowing his head to drop into the space between Vergil’s blanketed shoulder and the back of the bench.

Vergil looks down at the cup in his hands. The thick chocolate within is about a third lower compared to Nero’s, and is missing quite a number of marshmallows.

Nero pauses halfway into taking his first sip, looking at Vergil’s chocolate, too.

They both twist to stare at Dante as one.

Dante is licking away his own chocolate mustache with a careless grin. “I wanted some. I wasn’t about to take my favourite nephew’s…but old cranky here is fair game.”

Vergil pointedly mashes his heel into the top of Dante’s foot, and takes his first sip of chocolate in utter contentment as Dante howls.

The chocolate is blessedly sweet, comfortingly warm.

“Y’know,” Dante drawls, “You two are going to be a pain in the ass to spar when you’re well enough to start training again. You two are damn near telepathic by now.”

“Nero fights well,” Vergil murmurs. “He could always have beaten you.” He risks a glance to his right to find Nero’s cheeks turning beet red, and finds his own face rapidly heating as well.

Dante laughs out loud.

A serene pause.

Vergil’s eyes slide to his son, carefully. “I could,” he begins, and stops as the words stick in his throat. “If you wished, I could…with your training…I…”

Nero looks momentarily stunned. “Are you…offering to train me?”

Vergil determinedly looks at a tulip by his feet and nods once. Then he sneaks a glance back at his son and finds Nero wearing an expression that makes him look ten years younger – like a small child whose father has offered him the world.

It is too much all at once. Vergil looks anywhere but at his son and brother, and watches the sky instead.

The sun travels overhead in a blessedly slow arc.

Dante digs his bristly face into Vergil’s left shoulder and falls asleep. Neither Vergil or Nero speak, an unspoken wish not to break the peace in the little garden resting earnest and heavy between them, and Vergil has almost dozed off himself with his head against the warm wood of the bench when a soft weight drops onto his right shoulder.

It takes every ounce of self-control not to tense, and Vergil dips his chin carefully to find his son’s spiky hair tickling his nose where Nero has slid in sleep down to Vergil’s shoulder, the empty mug slipping in his lax hands.

Vergil is glad there is nobody else in the garden with them, because he does not quite trust himself not to start smiling like fool right there and then.

Then the garden doors slide quietly open, and the smile slips off Vergil’s face as Nicoletta tiptoes out onto the grass, a wide grin on her lips and a camera in her hand.

 _You would not dare,_ he mouths at her.

She rolls her eyes and looks pointedly at Nero, and Vergil grinds his teeth because he knows she is right – his brother is fair game, but Vergil would never risk waking his son, even to avoid the humiliation Nicoletta would likely hold over his head for years to come.

Then Nero presses closer to Vergil in sleep, mumbling disjointed syllables, and Vergil could swear hearts begin to pour out of Nico’s eyes.

And so Vergil sits still, seething, as the soft _click_ of Nico’s camera joins the birdsong of the garden, and Dante and Nero breathe quietly against him.

Then Nico slips back into the house with a thumbs up and a wink, and quiet stillness falls over the garden again.

Vergil has never felt so warm, and so content, since the tranquil afternoons of his childhood with Dante beside him, wooden swords in hand, and the sky an unbroken arc of brightest blue, his family safe within reach.

They rest together, three white-haired heads against the garden bench, until the sun slips at last towards the horizon and they are called in to supper.

(:~:)

Fanart by [LittleBlueWraith](https://littlebluewraith.tumblr.com/post/639260725648506880/unfinished-picture-of-the-photo-nico-took-at-the) of the picture Nico took at the end of this chapter, with Vergil glaring daggers at the camera and our two other Sparda bois happily sleeping away!

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> "Give us Dante snuggles," my twin [WafflesRisa](https://archiveofourown.org/users/WafflesRisa/pseuds/WafflesRisa) said. (She has been _essential_ in the planning and execution of this story, by the way, so check out her writing if any of you are 1917 fans)
> 
> "I WILL GIVE YOU SNUGGLES OR GIVE YOU DEATH," I declared, and proceeded to write...this. The whole blanket gratuitous hugging touch-starved mess this was.
> 
> I hope it was a satisfying ending to this two-part story. I will likely continue to dabble this this particular universe, so look out for more stories in this series later on.
> 
> If anyone is interested in Star Wars, I'm most known for my fics in that fandom. You can also find me on tumblr at [eirianerisdar](https://eirianerisdar.tumblr.com).
> 
> I'll be replying to comments soon!
> 
> Edit 17/12/2020: Hard at work for the next instalment in this series, in which Nero does the smart thing and goes to see a therapist.
> 
> ...Eventually bringing Vergil along, of course.


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